Update: The county clerk reversed her decision after getting national publicity and a media lawyer’s cease-and-desist letter.

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Today’s Rocky Mountain Collegian – Colorado State University’s student paper – has a page one piece on U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, who is running for re-election. Larimar County Clerk Angela Myers had them removed from student center racks because, she said, they violated electioneering laws.

She cited a Colorado statute that says “no electioneering may take place within a 100-foot limit of any polling location” and added that “when you have a paper that has a candidate on the very front like it does, we will need that to be displayed outside the 100-foot limit.”

Executive editor Kate Winkle says the clerk’s actions are “clearly a violation of the First Amendment.”

The Collegian was covering an event, we are not campaigning for Mark Udall and we would have had the same coverage had Cory Gardner or any politician affected by this election come to campus. I hope that the Larimer County Clerk’s office continues to respect the freedom of the press and I look forward to working with them further through the duration of the election season.

Yes, there appears to be a communications problem at the Sun-Times. Employees there found out about the sale of the Sun-Times’ suburban papers to Tribune Publishing by reading media bloggers’ tweets. Eventually, they received this note – my source calls it a “say-nothing memo” – from Sun-Times CEO Tim Knight.

Dear Colleagues:

I know you’ve seen the speculation about the sale of some Sun-Times Media titles.

We don’t comment on rumors but I want to assure you that everything we do is to strengthen the company.

Tim Knight

At present, our parent, Wrapports, LLC, is evaluating a variety of investments to continue to execute our digital strategy and grow the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the country’s great newspapers.

What I know for sure is that we are entering one of the busiest seasons of our year. I appreciate all of your hard work and continued focus on our readers, advertisers and partners.

Best regards,

Tim Knight

Hey, Tim, instead of mentioning “speculation” and “rumors,” why don’t you tell your employees what’s going on? Are you still in talks with Tribune Publishing? Or have you wrapped it up and just waiting for a press release to be written? Why not treat your journalists like partners?

David Carr talked with Jill Abramson at a WBUR event last night. I’m listening to the conversation now and posting excerpts.

On the Ebola coverage

Jill Abramson: It’s been, I think, disgraceful in many respects. I have to roll my eyes when, like today, I’m reading all these stories about “the panic.” Well, who helped cause the panic? I mean, please!

David Carr: When you say that, are you saying there is an overreaction, or there should be an overreaction?

JA: No, there is an overreaction.

DC: But people are scared.

JA: People are scared in part because of the ceaseless, ominous cable and other coverage, which stokes their fears. Two people are sick and one person has died. That’s what’s happened – in the United States. Obviously I’m not talking about coverage of the disease in West Africa. ….I’m talking about the coverage about, IT’S COMING HERE!

Our unreliable government

DC: We’ve come to believe that our government doesn’t know what it’s doing almost never, and we don’t trust them – we don’t trust them to handle it. The president has a really bold grand plan to insure everybody and the thing rolls out and … it doesn’t work./CONTINUESRead More

I asked Lexington Herald-Leader reporter Janet Patton if any reporters went for the booze. “I did not,” she writes. (And bourbon is her beat, by the way.) “Didn’t see any reporters consuming either. Mostly politicians. Did I mention it was at 10 am?” She adds in second Twitter DM: “There also was coffee.”

* Different media worlds for conservatives and liberals. (cnn.com) | Rem Rieder: The findings aren’t good news for democracy. (usatoday.com) | The Pew Research study: Political Polarization & Media Habits. (journalism.org)
* Jill Abramson and Steve Brill aim to do “killer journalism [while] offering great journalists real money that they can live on.” (bostonglobe.com)
* Are you – like Jill and Steve – considering a startup? Here’s some advice: (dailydot.com)
* Tribune Publishing is buying the Sun-Times’ suburban papers. (robertfeder.com)
* What a Tulsa World photojournalist’s $10,499 Canon lens looks like after a football player landed on it. (petapixel.com)
* Rebecca Carroll: “At nearly every job I have ever had, I have encountered some sort of racial incident.” (newrepublic.com)
* NYT’s Dylan McClain blasts Slate’s Matt Gaffney: “It is easy to be a bloviating critic with unlimited space on the Web, it takes real journalism skills and, frankly, integrity, to write about chess as I did.” (chessbase.com)
* New Orleans football fans want to read game stories in a print paper. (niemanlab.org)
* WNYC’s Brian Lehrer: “When Yogi Berra and Wynton Marsalis came to the studio, I was a jelly-legged mess.” (wsj.com)
* More women are reading Popular Mechanics, says editor-in-chief Ryan D’Agostino. (capitalnewyork.com)* Bloomberg Politics didn’t learn from the Boston Herald watermelon toothpaste brouhaha? (@baratunde) | What the web editor says: “It’s a story about the President’s chef and some of his recipes, including his secret wing recipe. Yes, out of context that picture could seem offensive, which is why we took it down.”
* Denver Post editor Greg Moore tweaks Westword for “policing tweets.” (westword.com)
* This happens? “Students sometimes pretend to send text messages when they are alone out of fear that if they are not constantly connected to their smartphones, they will be seen as losers.” (baltimoresun.com)
* Prediction: Online TV will eventually become just plain TV, and cable will become a dead technology. (wired.com)
* Jim Brady: BuzzFeed editors “don’t worry a lot about juxtaposition of stories and tone the way older news organizations do so it’s OK to put cat pictures next to an Iraq story.” (medium.com/captivate-us)
* From journalist Robert Schenet‘s death notice: “Donations to West Seattle Food Bank or just buy a newspaper or better yet subscribe.” (legacy.com)